I've listened to a couple of episodes of the new Techmeme podcast. I was really excited to hear about it. I imagined something like the Daily podcast or Fresh Air, or any number of podcasts built around an interview with an interesting person, with the focus on tech. The Techmeme podcast takes a different approach, one more like radio news programs of the past, where the presenter, Brian McCullough, reads summaries of stories that are presumably the top items for the day on Techmeme. #

Called Ride Home, each episode begins with the headlines followed by what I assume is its positioning statement: "Here's what you missed today in the world of tech," followed by a synopsis of each story, read from a script. There are other podcasts that assume this voice -- notably the Whistlestop podcast with CBS newsperson John Dickerson. #

I want to like this podcast because I'm a longtime reader of Techmeme, and a fan of McCullough's Internet History Podcast. I was hoping it would be like a short version of that podcast every day, a candid interview with a tech newsmaker or a reporter at one of the pubs that Techmeme covers. I will keep listening because this is potentially an important podcast. #

On the other hand, I understand that this is the format they would arrive at by adapting Techmeme to a podcast. But sometimes a literal translation isn't the most useful approach. Techmeme is of course useful as a web page, refreshed many times during the day. Voice offers an opportunity to approach the mind through a different channel, to spread new ideas, more than "what you missed." #

I hope Mueller has a dead man switch, that dumps all his accumulated evidence if El Orange succeeds in firing him.#

At some point the majority that does not support Trump, even at his most moderate, will have to act if the Republican leadership doesn't. And I don't see how waiting for the election can work. We have to act as the Florida high school students did.#

I guess the Trump people feel they have to move now. I don't think they'll have much support. Even his base will be split. Obviously there's something explosive about to come out. But this isn't Watergate. It's more like BattleStar Galactica. It's a war and we're fighting an inhuman enemy, one that doesn't behave like a human. It's an amalgam of all of humanity.#

Trump being gone won't help us very much because so much has changed. A silent war has been going on. We have not had any defenses. It's an asymmetric war, unlike any we've ever (not) fought. The press is oblivious, still, focused on the Watergate-ness of the situation and missing that now our society and economy are fully wired, to an extent not even foreshadowed in the time of Watergate. #

The press ought to listen to techies. We're still seen as low-level workers. But our counterparts in Russia and elsewhere are undermining everything. Here too probably. #

Nailing Trump won't fix it. It would be like killing a comedian, a distraction. The real action has been on our networks. #

Remember what McLuhan said. It's not about armies anymore, it's about media. And we, all of us, are media now. #

Imagine journalism as a rectangular box. They've tried to move what they do from print to the net without changing the shape of the box. In their world this all as a replay of Watergate. It's familiar, they know what to do, and btw it had a happy ending. That's what we call wishful thinking. A bit of a bedtime story.#

My brain is somewhat adjusting to the new vision situation. I have five old pairs of glasses to try out and think I have settled on one tha's best for computer work. I did a podcast (below) because that doesn't use my eyes for much. My brain really wants to do something creative. Let's see if I can figure it out. ;-)#

A podcast about Linux Journal, Doc Searls and why he became its new editor-in-chief. Doc, one of the Cluetrain authors, has a vision for advertising that works. If it works, it will not only revolutionize advertising, it will also help get software development back on track. His project really has the potential. #

The other day a friend asked for a reference that showed the role I played in the bootstrap of podcasting. I looked around, and most of the stories written by journalists are wildly innaccurate. Then I realized there's a better way to show the work. I archived the earliest podcasts so they'd be easily found. This is imho the best anchor point. There's no question these are podcasts. They were a collaboration between myself, Chris Lydon and Bob Doyle. There was important work that predated it, with myself and Adam Curry, and podcasting came together as a growing medium in the summer of 2004 after the DNC with the iPodder group, all independent of what we were doing at Harvard. But these podcasts, the BloggerCon sessions, and the Berkman Thursday meetups, all were central to the bootstrap. Others have managed to insert themselves into the story, they don't belong there. It's important, if we want to create more open media types, to tell the story accurately.#

Yesterday, Jay Rosen reported on Twitter that the NYT, in a redesign, had eliminated its paragraph-level permalinks (like the ones yousee on Scripting News). He was peeved, for sure, and imho had every right to be. I asked if this broke existing links, i.e. had he been using the feature (I assume so) and did the links still point to paragraphs on the NYT site (yes, of course they pointed there, but did the links work when clicked). It's hard to phrase this question for non-developers, but the issue is real.#

Users don't like steps backwards. This applies equally to word processers and websites. It's all software. Only in this case they're developers too because URLs are an API, and as we know APIs break. 💥#

Does the NYT have an obligation to continue to support this feature? Of course not. But one of the unwritten rules of the web, going way back, is that linkrotsucks and we should do everything we can to minimize it. The NYT has been conspicuously excellent at not breaking links, btw, over the 20-plus year history of news on the web. #

To get an idea of how bad linkrot is, here's an archive page for this blog for November 1999. Try clicking on some links. So many of them are broken. #

PS: As far as I'm concerned credit for the concept and the term linkrot goes to Jakob Nielsen, but it's hard to find any references to his authoritative piece on the subject. How nice that his 20-year-old piece is still there and renders nicely in a 2018 browser. It would be ironic if it had been lost to linkrot. 🚀#

My eyes don't work very well this week. As a result I can barely see when I'm out walking. To look at the price on a cash register I have to put my face in it. Add to that my hearing isn't so great, it's like a comedy when I'm out and about.#

It's kind of fun to walk around Manhattan barely being able to see. No chance of eye contact. Which means I win every faceoff. That's one of the rules of being a pedestrian in NY, if fail to avert your eyes, you lose. ​#

With the hearing it's age. I've had it tested and functionally it's fine.The brain, as you age, has trouble separating sounds in noisy places. So at Chipotle, for example, that plays fairly loud music as background, renders my hearing pretty much useless.#

However it activates my sense of humor. And wonderment that I can function like this. I couldn't drive a car, however. And I might have trouble navigating a new neighborhood, because I can't read street signs.#

It's bad timing because I just started working with a bunch of testers on my new product. Please stay tuned, hopefully my eyes will be back in commission next week. Until then it's going to be a lot of Netflix and book reading for Davey.#

I have an eye infection. This is a new thing for me since I started wearing contact lenses last year. This means I have to try to get along wearing glasses for a few days. My eyesight with glasses is terrible. Writing is kind of an adventure! So it may be slow going here for me, for the next few days until (hopefully) the infection clears up and I can resume life as a normally sighted person. I am of course getting help from my doctor. #

I'm looking for a few people to help test a new product. You should be an RSS user, have an OPML subscription list or two (or more), and are ready to read docs, report problems, and ask questions. If you'd like to participate please post a note here. Thanks! 💥#

Why isn't SSL just a checkbox in the prefs for the an S3 bucket? Amazon already knows who I am. They know more about me than the IRS. 💵#

If Google were honest they'd explain they're trying to create a Facebook-like experience in the web, and label sites as being inside or outside their domain. If they don't want to make a web browser, use some of their wealth to subsidize one. A thinking-big company would do that.#

Happy to report that I'm starting to get more reasonable and thoughtful responses to my Google and HTTP faq. I have toned it down, remembering that some people came to the belief that HTTP is bad for the web honestly, and therefore may respond to more simply-stated objections. And this has led me to a distillation of the moral case against what Google is doing. #

I've been around the tech industry almost as long as anyone. I've yet to see a tech company grow past the "break things and never look back" stage. What comes next, imho, is understanding that the people they serve are not who they think they are. I highlighted the word serve in that sentence. It's an unfamiliar concept to the tech industry, but they should learn it. It's more humble, more achievable than the godlike status they feel they deserve, an adolescent way of thinking. #

What Google is planning on doing to the web is unnecessarily damaging to the work of millions of people. Google could step back and look at their objectives, and let's see if we can compromise, so they can get what they really want and the web can remain what it always has been, an open space for experimentation, free thought, and the development of world-changing ideas. It's where Google itself came from. #

Let's see if they gained any maturity and sense of perspective of their place in the world in the 20 years since their founding. When you achieve adulthood all of a sudden you can see the context in which you exist. Blowing things up is the way children approach the world. Adults try to work things out, we hope. 💥#

Journos generally fail to explain why steel tariffs cost American jobs. Here's why. GM or Ford can choose to make cars in Canada that cost $100 less than the same cars made in the US. Hence layoffs in car factories in the US. #

My site has no ads. If you run buggy ad blocking software that blocks my site, the remedy is to trash the software. #

Farhad Manjoo, tech columnist for the NYT wrote about a hiatus he took from social media and how much he liked it. According to CJR, he actually didn't take a hiatus. Makes sense. How could a reporter not use Twitter these days? That's where news is made. #

Edward Snowden says "unencrypted web traffic is now provably a critical, in-the-wild vulnerability." Why? Because ISPs invisibly redirect download requests of popular programs to new versions with spyware added. Better: don't download an app that runs on your local computer from a site that isn't being served via HTTPS. But it doesn't follow that sites that don't offer downloads should be blocked. It's like saying drunk driving is dangerous and therefore all driving should be banned. Let's not break the web if we don't have to. #

I just updated the Google and HTTP faq, adding a new section about the web and safety, and quite a few other edits and reorgs.#

Matt Webb is a new voice in opposition to Google's treating the web as if it were a corporate platform. I added this to his tweets: "Google is trying to force people to change. I can accept them doing that for APIs and platforms they created, but not for the web. They are a guest here, as we all are. Guests don't make the rules."#

As I read this, I kept thinking, this is the company that thinks they can run the web better than the people who were running it before (i.e. no one).#

I often get asked if I hate AMP -- I don't, but maybe I'm missing something. As far as I know, Google isn't trying to force people to use it, rather providing incentives to do so. This is a key difference.#

Twitter and Facebook are like AOL in the old pre-web days. They are run by companies who are committed to provide a safe experience. They make tradeoffs for that. Limited linking. No style. Character limits. Blocking, muting, reporting, norms. Etc etc. Think of them as Disney-like experiences. #

Google says the web is not safe. That is correct. We don't want every place to be safe. So people can be wild and experiment and try out new ideas. It's why the web has been the proving ground for so much incredible stuff over its history. #

Lots of things aren't safe. Skiing. Bike riding in Manhattan. We do them anyway. You can't be safe all the time. Life itself isn't safe. #

If Google succeeds in making the web controlled and bland, we'll just have to reinvent the web outside of Google's sphere. Let's save some time, and create the new web out of the web itself. #

PS: Of course we want parts of the web to be safe. Banking websites, for example. But my blog archive from 1997? Really there's no need for special provisions there. #

Brian McCullough of the Internet History Podcast is teaming up with Techmeme to do a daily tech podcast. 15-20 minutes. It'll be posted in the early evening. There is definitely a position here. I'll be listening for sure. Here's the feed url. And it's in the rotation at Podcatch.com.#

Approx 20-minute podcast about podcasting as a juggernaut. Why is it a juggernaut? You don't have to get permission to start a podcast, you can follow an idea intuitively, creatively. I offer two examples, the Internet History Podcast and Here's the Thing. Two podcasts that are not like what you hear in the excellent field of podcasts that sprang from This American Life. And that's just a tiny corner of what's out there. It's huge and diverse. No one gets the whole thing. Podcasting will continue to evolve as long as it's not controlled. #

Hire a professional journalist and they will tell you that the professionals won. Podcasting is for everyone, and that includes professionals. I do a podcast every once in a while myself. It doesn't set the world on fire, but the idea of podcasting did. The medium is the message. 🚀#

For a troll, normalization is the worst thing possible. Like pouring water on the wicked witch in Oz.#

Little-known fact. The initials for Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the web, are the same as the initials for The Big Lebowski, a classic Coen Bros movie. Can't say you never learned anything on Scripting News. #

It's not necessary to actually watch Knicks games because they all seem to end the same. Last night they played the Sacramento Kings, another lottery team, and you might think here's a game the Knicks might actually be able to win. Nahh. At least they're consistent! #

A friend who happens to be a Yankees fan is also a Knicks fan, and we talk about the team regularly. He wonders why he's a Knicks fan if they always lose. I said I know the answer. The Knicks are his atonement for being a Yankees fan. Now what does this say about me, a lifetime Mets fan? Well, one thing -- winning isn't the most important thing. And that said, unlike the Knicks, the Mets do win once in long while. Even that amount of winning requires atonement, I guess. #

Speaking of winners, by the middle of the Oscars show last night I concluded that Get Out would win everything. Unfortunately not so. I think in a few years we will have forgotten The Shape of Water, and Get Out will have been the beginning of something new. The combination of politics, comedy, romance, tragedy and horror is hard to beat. #

I was delighted that Allison Janney won best supporting actress. I, Tonya was a wonderful movie. It could have gotten a Best Picture nomination. And Janney was brilliant as Harding's bitter, cigarette-smoking hardass waitress mother. #

Jennifer Lawrence and Jody Foster made the best on-stage couple comedy act. I was staring at Foster on her crutches before my attention turned to Lawrence, who is by far my favorite actress of her generation, for her irreverence, intelligence, and last night sheer gobsmacking beauty. She's beautiful the way Hedy Lamarr was. And what an actress. She's still only 26 and one can only imagine what delights await us. I'm more than a fan, I am in awe. #

Sometimes the Academy passes on a movie that goes on to have great significance. For me, the most interesting example is The Big Lebowski. It didn't win a single Oscar. I wonder what the judges must have thought of it. A silly insignificant comedy? It's weird because TBL came after Fargo, which was much-celebrated by the Oscars. The year Lebowski would have been up for an award, Shakespeare in Love won best picture, and imho the other winners were also Big Mehs. Imho there's no doubt The Big Lebowski was the Best Picture in 1999. But you don't necessarily know it in the moment. History has a role to play too. #

I really liked it. But I was pretty sure I would. I'll tell you why. #

When I first saw There Will Be Blood, the previous collaboration between Paul Thomas Anderson and Daniel Day-Lewis, the first time I watched it, I didn't like it. Too dark, too slow, not enough story, odd sad ending. Meh. But then for some reason I watched it again, and had the opposite reaction. A masterpiece. The pace was just right, and there totally was a story. It was just so slow, your mind has to get in the right gear to appreciate it. It's not an easy movie to like. But who said movies have to be easy?#

Same with Phantom Thread. The. Pace. Is. So. Deliberate. The characters say so little. We're watching the most mundane acts. But it builds and a story emerges, and the music and the acting are superb, the story is fascinating. It's the kind of movie to watch again, alone, like you read a book, to savor every moment. #

I wouldn't have given it Best Picture, not in the same year as Get Out, but Phantom Thread, like There Will Be Blood, will age well. #

I've been sharing a story offline with NakedJen about loved ones who pass and what they're doing while waiting for us to join them in the afterlife. #

The story began a few years ago with each of us as an airplane on a runway, and life is us taking off and flying. As time goes by there's less runway in front of us (the future) and more behind (experience).#

Lately there's a new twist to the story. Her dogs, led by Clyde (the only one whose name I know) are busily preparing a perfect dog park for Jen to live in. There will be many things to throw and catch. And things to smell and roll around in. A tree with shade to rest under. A bowl of fresh water. Treats. Jen will have a Mac, an iPad, an iPhone and a place to get Kombucha. There's a Coffee Garden up there too. And don't forget Sundance and the annual NJFF. I have that pencilled in on my afterlife agenda as well. :-)#

I realize that my collection of Zillow searches are part of my planning for the afterlife. Lately I haven't been paying that much attention, but this house in Taos came along today and it immediately made sense. My Zillow queries are me shopping for where I want to live, for eternity. That house is pretty close what I want to build at the end of my runway.#

PS: A plot for a science fiction movie. You know how Silicon Valley moguls are trying to find the cure for death so they can live forever. Well, in this story, they succeed, and they do live forever. Their friends and loved ones die as people normally do. And they're watching, in a dimension only the dead occupy, as their silly friends struggle to live forever while they're enjoying the many benefits of the afterlife (see above). #

I started a page with my political views. As they change, if I stick to it, the page will change as well. Note when I edit the changes automatically post. Reload the page to be sure you're looking at the latest. #

The press sees only one thing when they look at tech -- companies. The biggest ones. They are not the exclusive driving force of technology. Open systems, that they always oppose, keep undermining them. You're not even getting 1/2 the story.#

It's important because there's a lot of political movement when tech's grip on tech is gone, when there's a generational shift in platforms. I've seen at least four of these in my life: Unix, PCs, GUI (Mac/Windows), Web. The powerful companies were always caught flat-footed.#

The blindness of the press re tech evolution always amazes me. At first I thought they all must see it. A few did, in the early days, but now -- that knowledge appears lost.#

It's important that they see it because the press has been an important part of the transition at least in the turn to GUIs and the web. I have a feeling the next platform will rise out of journalism getting tired of waiting for tech, believe it or not.#

Also when the press looks for transformational change, they tend to see ones that require massive capital investment, and miss the ones that break the rules of the incumbent platform. The PC let people have their own computer without interference from corporate managers.#

The Mac let people publish their own documents, newsletters, and evolved into a platform that could publish newspapers and magazines, far less expensively and much more easily that typographic systems they replaced.#

And the web upended the GUI's dominance, by making networking so simple anyone could do it. And making the niceties of print unnecessary. It was really something watching the WYSIWYG crowd (of which I was one) struggle with the inability of the web to be wizzy.#

Yet the web rose to dominance because the power of networking (Amazon, FB, Twitter, email, banking, Yelp, Craigslist, podcasting, etc etc) was so huge. Okay it didn't look as pretty but look at what it DOES.#

I think we owe Attorney General Jeff Sessions our gratitude for standing up for the rule of law. I don't agree with his values or politics, but it's good to know there is a baseline of respect for our system of government.#

If you're subscribed to this blog, you might also want to subscribe to my linkblog feed. The links I post to Twitter and Facebook, in RSS form. #

I'm afraid at this point the Knicks will never be great. The team has the stink of mediocrity on it, it's hard to see how that gets undone. Basketball is a highly political game. And great players take years to develop. And a lot of that development is political. #

Occam's Newsroom reports Hope Hicks is going to jail too, that's why she quit now, so she could stop committing crimes every day. Her job description, if accurately written, was a crime.#

This email from friend Allen Wirfs-Brock confirms there's a way around Google's fork of the web. One of the most powerful emails I've received in 24 years of blogging. A grim situation turns bright. 🚀💥#

Drag and drop doesn't need a target. If you want an app to handle drag and drop, if it can do things other than edit files, just be willing to accept a drop anywhere in the window. When the user lets up, confirm that's what they intended to do. Prior art is Google's image search page. #

Re the NRA. Dick's Sporting Goods is no longer selling assault rifles. And won't sell guns to people under 21. This is a huge deal. We need more like this. But -- trying to get Roku to drop NRA TV, that's not only not useful, it's very very very bad. The First Amendment is super important, as is The Golden Rule. Speech is a good thing, even if you detest what they're saying. And discounts to NRA members? Please that's harmless. NRA members are not the problem. Go to the source. Picket gun stores until they follow DSG's lead. That will save lives. Measure success for now as stopping sales of new weapons of war. #

Google is famous for its AI and machine learning. With that in mind, how much trouble would it be for Google to determine that Little Card Editor never asks for a credit card number, and they can stop lying to users saying that it might.#

Bottom line, things that are free are not safe. You have to use your mind at all times when using the web (or Gmail for that matter). Google can if they want make a browser that's like Disneyland. But to try to turn the open web into Disneyland, that's a travesty.#

An email from friend Allen Wirfs-Brock, one of the most interesting emails I've ever received. Seriously. #

Dave, I saw your tweet about building a browser by using Electron hosting Chromium. You know, that is exactly how Brendan Eich’s Brave browser is implemented. I highly recommend it as an alternative to Chrome.#

Brave very much thinks of itself as an “user agent” and that the user is the ultimate authority on what the browser does. For example, all of their ad blocking and tracking protection (they call these shields) mechanisms are easily user enabled or disabled globally or on a per site basis.#

I suspect it wouldn’t be hard to define “shields” that instead of simply marking http sites as “insecure”did an alert on first user input to http sites or have other various levels of protection. It’s the sort of user control that I think they would be on-board with once they fully understood the user perspective. (On the other hand they are immersed in the Bay Area's HTTPS-should-be-used-everywhere culture so they might not immediately get it.)#

In either case, their most likely immediate response would be “it's open source, do the work and submit a pull request”. That is easier said then done, but you might want to take a look at what it would actually take.#

Found a problem with nodeStorage. I'm using this space to work it out. #

Here's the problem. If you go to a story on Doc Searls' 1999.io blog, it adds the port the server is running on, 1999, to the URL and redirects to it. That's because nodeStorage is not running on port 80. That's a recent thing. I used to have it running on port 80, but I needed to use PagePark for other apps running on the machine, so I moved nodeStorage to port 1999. #

What's going on. nodeStorage is doing something cool. Actually the URL that's generated by the CMS is this. When the request comes in for that address, it notices that there's a mapping from doc.blog to that sub-site, and redirects to it. It's pretty invisible, and a bit clever. I can't imagine someone else debugging this in the future and not being puzzled by it. (Hence this long comment.)#

The answer. nodeStorage needs a bit more configuration. A boolean, say flUsePortInRedirect. If you don't need us to add the port to the URL we redirect to, set this to false. To maintain backward compatibility, it defaults true.#

Now I have to implement it! I haven't updated nodeStorage in six months. I kind of don't like doing it, let a sleeping dog lie, etc. But I'm in the mood today to fix things. So here goes. #

Update: It worked the first time. Now to update the repository. Done. #

I've been writing a lot about Google and HTTP, but getting them to ease up on the web is not the only option. We could change how we view Chrome and Firefox. Instead of thinking of them as web browsers, think of them as browsing a new thing that's a descendant of the web, a fork of the web but not the whole web.Which creates a need for web browsers, i.e. ones that include parts of the pre-2018 web that Google is deprecating. If they don't budge, and my guess is they won't, this will be our only recourse. But it may not be that bad.#

Just putting that out there. I'm not going to create this web browser, at least not yet. I have an idea that it could be created using Electron. Not sure. Ironic that the browser inside Electron is (drum roll) Chrome. What made me think of this was a documentary on Olympic snowboarding and how the racers sometimes improvise even if it means losing the competition. They interviewed leading snowboarders, and they emphatically said these are the values of the sport. I loved the way they talked about it and it struck a chord. Imho they are also the values of web developers. #

So perhaps we are called on to improvise. It could be the best thing ever. The web might have more than one life. We don't know. But getting the BigCo's out of the driver's seat, that alone would be worth trying out just to see what it feels like. It might be like 1995? 💥#

Another analogy. There's a concept of a pre-CBS Fender guitar. Back in the day, guitarists wanted the old Telecasters and Stratocasters, not the new ones, made by Fender after they were acquired by CBS. In this analogy, you and I are guitarists, the web is Fender, and CBS is Google.#

I'd like to tackle other problems having to do with the integrity of the web. If the issue is assuring that what you're looking at is the original content, I think there must be a less heavy-handed solution than replacing the web server. Why not store a checksum in some place you can only get to if you're authentic (use your Twitter or Facebook account, for example). Then the browser gets the checksum and compares it with the checksum it computed. Of course the location that stores the checksum is accessed over HTTPS. Goodbye man-in-the-middle attacks. (Obviously I haven't vetted this, I'm not by any means a security expert.)#

Another idea I'd like to try is a new concept I call retired domains. I don't think it should be possible to buy gawker.com, for example, and put whatever you like there. Just as sports teams retire numbers, I'd like to make it possible to retire domains. Maybe you have to pay a comparatively large amount of money to retire a domain, say $10K. But at that point the content of the site is downloaded, stored on a hardened server, and the domain is automatically renewed every year, for perpetuity. Go ahead and make it work over HTTPS. I think this is technologically and financially doable. I would definitely pay $10K to freeze certain domains. I'd sign an agreement that survives me. #

I'm sure there are other things. Maybe the web will become an entrepreneurial space now that Chrome and Firefox are effectively withdrawing from it.#

Going through photos from Mom's house. There are lots. This picture struck me. She's probably in her 40s. Looks like she's in a school, on an important call, and someone took this candid unposed picture. My friends always said she was the prettiest mom. She was also smart, and worked tirelessly for kids. #

Yesterday's rambling piece about Google and HTTP was good to write, but hard to understand. I'm working on a FAQ page, focusing on the reasons what they're doing is bad that have nothing to do with my specific situation. It's very much a work in progress.#

BTW, we've been here before with Google, when they didn't fully support RSS in Reader. Dominant product, removes features from important public format. I hope people notice this time, it's much bigger, removing HTTP from the web, maybe people won't. I'm okay with them knocking my sites off the web. It'll happen sooner or later anyway.#

I think that covers it. I list them here to prove I've been listening and understand what they say, so hopefully someone doesn't try to explain it to me yet again.#

The second reason, something bad could happen -- well lots of bad things could happen. I can't afford to protect against all of them. I wonder if they ever think about the human being who is supposed to do the work? We have lives, and priorities, we must make choices about how we spend time. Maybe our websites aren't our number one priority? Even if they were, I would much rather develop new stuff than invest in protecting archives of blogs and old docs against hypothetical problems. #

Nothing is going to happen to the pages themselves, btw -- they're worried about how people view the docs through their browser. If the web becomes so polluted with man-in-the-middle attacks, I can think of quicker workarounds. For example, I could send the reader a zipped archive of a website. That would be an easy place to add encryption. No need to transition all my sites. And if the problems never materialize, a possibility even Google must admit, we could make a new kind of web browser, that's another option. One which unlike Google's, will let you browse the full web, not just Google's limited idea of what the web is. I think this represents a good opportunity to get Google out of the way. If we get there it will be worth a try.#

Re the third point, it's quick and easy -- it wouldn't be for me. I experimented for a few years with the idea that a domain could be the address of a document, or a shortened link. I have hundreds of such domains. #

One more thing before I get to the point. Some of the people Google thinks are going to convert to HTTP have moved on. There's no one there to do the thing Google wants them to do. What then?#

The first reason, above, is the most important one, by far. And the lack of thought and care on the part of Google illustrates exactly why it's so incredibly important.#

The numbers they present are misleading, they talk about web traffic, not web sites. If you add up Amazon, Netflix, Wikipedia, Google, Wordpress, Facebook and a dozen more sites, I bet that's 99 percent of the traffic of the web. But that does not represent the size of the problem. Some sites get almost no traffic, yet the information they contain could be valuable to someone in the future. Does Google cite the wrong stat because they don't know how much of the web's content is served through HTTP? Or, more likely, they know and therefore understand how what they're trying to do, if they don't plan to leave anything behind, amounts to boiling the ocean. I don't see an alternative explanation.#

Before the web, I spent a decade working on three corporate-owned platforms, the Apple II, IBM PC and Macintosh. I would say all companies tried reasonably hard to bring developers forward, most of the time, and for the most part I was able to make the transition. But, in all cases, I had a company behind me. Today I'm just one person. And in no case had I spent more than three years doing the work that required transitioning, so the job was relatively small by today's standards. Even so, given the short time, and the generally good intentions of the vendors, by the time we got to the Mac, they were already using breakage as a weapon against developers they didn't like, or who were occupying market segments they wanted to own. #

Before the web, I couldn't see a way to be an independent developer, as long as there was a platform vendor who ultimately would decide whether or not I would be allowed to continue. But the web changed all that. And it's why I can point to an archive site for a tool I created in 1994 that still works. That's 24 years of compatibility. That's some kind of record in the tech world. #

BTW, it's not my accomplishment, all I had to do was assure that the files stayed where they were. The accomplishment is the social agreement not to break things that we call the World Wide Web. It's like the Grand Canyon. It's a big natural thing, a resource, an inspiration, and like the canyon it deserves our protection. #

So now Google points a gun at the web and says "Do as we say or we'll tell users your site is not secure." What they're saying doesn't stand up to a basic bullshit-test. There's nothing insecure about my site. Okay I suppose it's possible you could get hurt using it, I'll grant you that. But I could get hurt getting up out of my chair and going into the kitchen to refill my coffee cup. Life is insecure. When Google says my old site is insecure what they really mean is "This is our platform now, and you do as we say or your site won't work." I don't believe for a minute that Google's motivation is protecting users. They seem to believe they can confuse users (they can) and that means they can do anything to the web they like. I suppose they can do that too. But it doesn't mean the web will cooperate. Imho, it won't.#

There was an old joke in the days of MS-DOS. A new version doesn't ship until Lotus 1-2-3 doesn't run. Probably wasn't true, but it did illustrate the extraordinary power Microsoft had over its then-chief competitor. This is the power Google thinks it has now over the web. #

I'm not going back to corporate platforms. And I have to admit, I like this kind of fight. All my career I've had my sandcastles knocked over by small people at big companies who envy me for my freedom. The web got them out of the way. And I'm determined to keep it that way, or I'll just let them knock my sites off the air. #

I saw Darkest Hour the other day. If you've seen it, you understand what I'm talking about. Even if I could convert the hundreds of domains I have on platforms that don't easily support HTTPS, even if it were just a matter of time, cost, volume of work, even if it were easy and quick as they say, I still wouldn't do it. I love the web. It gave me another 24 years as an independent software developer. What a gift. I'm not going to abandon it now. If this is where my 24-year run ends, so be it. There's no negotiating about this. Some things are absolute.#